Category Archives: “funny”

endlösung

The Germans, with their knack for putting a lot of meaning into a single compound word, have a word for “final solution”  — an infamous plan that was almost a decade in the making before it was carried out.  That word is endlösung.  It was used by Herr Hitler to describe his ultimate plan for the virulent enemies of the Thousand Year Reich, but he was coy about what it actually meant, lying to suit the occasion, until it became grimly clear what he meant — the forced relocation and mass murder of millions. By then, well, that was the final word on the mostly secret Final Solution.

I just read a brilliant February 2017 account, by Ron Rosenbaum, of the failure of German media, and German politicians, to ever get a hold on the slippery liar who would become their infallible leader for all twelve years of its glorious Thousand Year Reich [1].  He was, in the alarming manner of our own Donald J. Trump, normalized, even in his most bizarre, clownish, insane moments.  

There are some, I suppose, who still believe that Hitler’s military machine that conquered much of the world with its blitzkrieg, lightning war, a maniacally fast overrunning of nations by soldiers literally flying on speed, (a drug called Pervitin [2] was widely distributed to keep the wehrmacht triumphantly on the offensive), was Germany’s greatest hour.  Such people are, as a lawyer friend might put it, not unsympathetic to Nazism.

What is MAGA’s endlösung, er, endgame?  They want states’ rights, except when it comes to abortion, gay marriage, contraception, interracial marriage, voting rights, unlimited dark money in politics, repudiation of Climate Alarmism, end of all government “entitlements” and regulation, enforcement of cannibis prohibition and so forth.   All those are well within the federal government’s right to regulate everywhere at once, according to the unique and purely “transactional” legal geniuses of the extreme right-wing judicial fraternity known as the Federalist Society.  Standard rules for elections for federal office to ensure full voting rights for all citizens?  States’ Rights!  Medical insurance/health care for poor people?  States’ Rights!  Pollution?  States’ Rights!   Guns?  States’ rights!   The unappealable right of a state legislature to overturn an ugly election result?  States’ Rights!  

During the Third Reich, when Herr Hitler was making Germany great again, the Nazis realized the importance of having a uniform, lockstep, one party government, judiciary, media and culture.   Again, German had the word for it:  gleichschaltung.  Rosenbaum describes it:

But swiftly, oh so swiftly, the order of the day became “gleichschaltung” — “realignment,” or forced conformity, savage normalization. Goebbels and other Nazi propagandists made it their crusade to get the German body politic “adjusted” to the new reign of terror. “Gleichschaltung” meant normalize or else.


The first German profession to fully Nazify, expelling all Jews, Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, etc., was the German doctors.  They were quickly followed by German lawyers.  Soon it was the civil service and everything else.  If you wanted to advance, or even keep your job, as long as you weren’t a Jew, you swore an oath of personal loyalty to Herr Hitler.  In a very short time, it became normal that every clerk you met, every teacher, every policeman, every judge, was a Nazi who has taken a blood oath to whatever the Führer had decided to do that day.

So we have many MAGA candidates running on the proven lie that the 2020 presidential election (and not any others on those same ballots) was riddled with fraud, rigged, stolen from the rightful winner who got a record (for an incumbent) almost 74,000,000 votes.  Biden, not really the president, not REALLY, you know, if you consider how much outright fraud there was (none was actually demonstrated, outside of a few aged Floridians casting multiple votes for F POTUS), and all the allegations, well, you can’t ignore the millions who honestly believe that the REAL lie is that the election was fair.   They are literally running on the Big Lie.   

The Big Lie was perfected by Hitler’s PR genius, Minister of Public Enlightenment Aryan Superman Dr. Josef Goebbels (popularly known as the Poisonous Dwarf). Comparisons are odious sometimes, but when the foo shits…

[1]   Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post” February 5, 2017   •   By Ron Rosenbaum      https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/normalization-lesson-munich-post/?s=03


[2]  Pervitin was Nazi Germany’s wonder drug, one that was designed to enable pilots, sailors and infantry troops deliver superhuman performance. Soldiers who took Pervitin stayed awake for days at a time, walked for miles without resting, and felt no pain or hunger. Today we know this drug as methamphetamine, or crystal meth.  (from top google hit, oddly enough a site called Amusingplanet.com, under the title:  Pervitin: the Wonder Drug that Fueled Nazi Germany   

1https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/05/pervitin-wonder-drug-that-fueled-nazi.html)

Update on American Eichmann, Jeffrey Clark

The DC Bar Association Ethics Committee is investigating whether to take disciplinary action against Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s most loyal DOJ employee, a lawyer who was willing to send a letter from DOJ to multiple states asserting lies in order to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Ruth Marcus writing in yesterday’s Washington Post describes Clark’s response to the disciplinary committee.

The document reads like something the Federalist Society would submit if it had created an artificial intelligence program to draft legal pleadings. The bar doesn’t have authority to discipline Clark because that “would intrude on the President’s exclusive and unreviewable authority over federal criminal and civil investigations occurring during his term of office.” The bar can’t act “because the President has an absolute right to seek legal and other forms of advice as to the discharge of his responsibilities under the Take Care Clause.”

Disciplining Clark “would intrude on the President’s exclusive and unreviewable authority to remove and appoint senior officials of the Department of Justice.” It would violate the separation of powers, the supremacy clause, the confrontation clause, the equal protection clause, the due process clause and the prohibition against bills of attainder.

Also, he argues, it would trample on executive privilege, law enforcement privilege, the major questions doctrine, the political question doctrine, Clark’s “official immunity” and his freedom of speech. The Senate’s acquittal of Trump at his second impeachment bars the charges. Even Hunter Biden’s laptop makes a surprise appearance.

https://wapo.st/3dobVYg1

DeSantis and Abbott need to be prosecuted for this malicious taxpayer funded PR stunt

Texas governor, MAGA Man Greg Abbott and Florida strongman governor, MAGA man Ron DeSantis, are the new MAGA Abbott and Costello. Their latest hilarious prank was sending 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers from Texas to Florida, and then, at $12,000 a head, flying them to Martha’s Vineyard, with a film crew to document the libs of Martha’s Vineyard being owned by their own hypocrisy.

Leave aside the Florida taxpayer money DeSantis spent on this stunt, more than half a million dollars, leave aside the transparent cruel mockery of sending a film crew to get campaign footage, leave aside that these two fucks waited until they were within the DOJ’s 60 day no announcements of Investigations into political candidates period.

To get these people legally fleeing violence and oppression in Venezuela on to the airplanes for their publicity stunt, DeSantis promised them work, food, living places and help with their asylum applications. Instead they were sent to an island off the coast of Massachusetts where they would be unable to appear for their scheduled asylum hearings in various faraway locations.

Nazi comparisons are odious, of course, even when talking about the inhuman hijinks of our modern-day MAGA Abbott and Costello. However it’s hard not to think about the postcards Jews were forced to write to their families about how good everything was and how happy they were, before being loaded into cattle cars for transport to the death camps. Or even comparisons to our own murderous racists who, in the early 1960s sent southern Blacks to northern cities with similar false promises of work, new homes and freedom. When they arrived in the northern cities they were met by nobody, they were simply fucked. This happened here 60 years ago, and it happened right here the other day. Check this shit out:

The fool actually brought this lawsuit

F POTUS brought yet another lawsuit to obstruct justice, on bogus, frivolous, murky, dubious, ambiguous, unsworn legal claims. Claims in equity, actually, fairness harm that can’t be adequately remedied at law, according to F POTUS’s hand picked MAGA judge.

Check out the title of this transparent operation to block an ongoing criminal and national security investigation. You can’t make this shit up.

philosophical

Decades ago, in an ancient, narrow brick building on City College’s south campus, Wagner Hall, I think, an annex to the grand Mott Hall, if I recall correctly, (both most likely demolished and replaced by now) I took some philosophy courses.  In one of these classes the professor told us that to get into the philosopher’s club in ancient Athens a person was required to stand on a certain corner and, for one hour, not think of a polar bear (I never stopped to think how ancient Athenians would have known about polar bears).   The point was that this was a test to see if your mind was mature and disciplined enough to contemplate more important things and not be distracted by trivia, such as a random distraction it was useless to think about.  It was this kind of thing that drew me to philosophy, though, I have to say, of all the things I have read, philosophy was always the most poorly written.  Of course, philosophical treatises are full of uniquely complicated ideas badly translated, I never read Plato in the Greek or Kant in German.  It would have all been Greek to me anyway, as they say.

I’m thinking about this today because I’ve had some recent conversations during which, so long as I don’t ask the wrong question, often a very obvious one, everything is jolly and carefree.  I offer the example of a talk I had after the recent death of my old friend Les.   I’ll be writing and posting a little homage to Les soon.   Meantime, I learned of his death from some texts and emails the other night, sent and forwarded by an estranged friend, the widow of my dear friend Howie Katz, who died in 2010, shortly before my mother did.   It was Les, in fact, who called to give me the awful news about Howie.  In contrast to my mother’s long decline and struggle against death, Howie went out in a moment, painlessly, in his prime, like a candle flame winking out in a soft breeze.  While waiting at a red light at the bottom of a ramp a moment after exiting a freeway in East Bay.

I spoke to his wife fairly often in the weeks, months and years after Howie died.  It was my way of honoring my friendship with a beautiful soul, doing my best to help look after the person he loved the most, his wife Jackie.  She was in great pain and we would speak for hours at a time.  I live almost 3,000 miles from her (2,575), so these long phone calls were the closest I could come to visits.  Her pain focused on her isolation, how all of their good friends seemed to be avoiding her, as well as her ongoing, worsening troubles at work.  I listened with sympathy, condemning the friends she was angry at, agreeing that her longtime rival at work, Craig, was an evil bastard and that the rest of the hierarchy there who took his side, and kept promoting him, were spineless weasels.  Our talks kept to this format, after a quick back and forth about what was new in our lives I’d settle into listening to her detailed grievances and giving her support.

I was unable to be at Howie’s funeral, but I made sure to be at his unveiling (the ceremony in which the deceased’s gravestone is “unveiled”) a year later.  I helped Jackie shop for and prepare the food that would be served afterwards.  Exhausted after a short night’s sleep the night I arrived, I got up early, went on a shopping trip and helped out the best I could.  Preparing cucumbers and tomatoes for an Israeli salad (also known as a Lebanese salad, Palestinian salad, Turkish salad, etc. — just add minced garlic amd lemon juice) I sat in a chair in her kitchen.   She told me real chefs don’t sit, they stand, and then critiqued the size of the cubes I was cutting, way too big!  Howie found pleasure in serving and helping others, doing whatever they needed to feel comfortable.  I don’t have Howie’s grace, and probably muttered as I stood up, after protesting that I was not a real chef, and cut each of my cubes into four.  Aside from that, she was gracious about my help, I suppose.

Where Howie was gregarious, Jackie is mostly private.  Where Howie was outgoing, irreverent and sometimes hilarious, Jackie is not prone to reaching out to or entertaining others.  I’ve seen the kind of isolation in widowhood Jackie went through with other couples, including my parents.  After the death of the more socially adept partner, friends of the couple begin drifting away.   I did not want Howie’s wife to feel this distance from me.  I’d been their guest many times, loved Howie, had always had a good relationship with Jackie, who is very smart and used to have (at any rate, I remember it) a good sense of humor and a hearty laugh.

Over the years, it got harder and harder.  One thing that grated on Sekhnet (who also loved Howie and accepted Jackie for the sake of Howie) was Jackie’s ingratitude, or to put it more charitably, her difficulty expressing gratitude.   The hardest I ever worked was the week I spent before her daughter’s wedding, playing the guitar seven to ten hours a day to come up with arrangements, and making sure I was able to execute all the parts flawlessly every time, to be a one man band behind my friend who was playing the melodies on harmonica or sax.  The music came off great on the day of the wedding.  The bride, who’d asked us to play, which honored us greatly, hugged us and thanked us afterwards.   Jackie never said anything.  I understood finally that she is probably on the Asperger’s spectrum.  Eventually, after several more attempts to keep our relationship alive over the next few years, I succumbed to the numbness of unrequited friendship.

When all the texts and emails came in from her about Les being in his final hours the other night (she’d also waited til Rom was in a coma to inform me, by text, that he was in the hospital) I began responding to Jackie’s “this is not good” text when I hit dial instead and a moment later was speaking to her.   

We commiserated about our friend until, about five minutes in, Jackie began telling me of her recent struggles and sorrows, she’d had a stroke — which I hadn’t ever inquired about, or even seemed to know about — and then she told the detailed story of her father’s death, at 99, how badly he’d wanted to make it to 100 and how much harder it was for everybody that his death happened during Covid.  The pain to her sister, who’d been forced to attend the funeral over Zoom, was something she and her sister were having a very hard time with.   We spoke for about a half hour, or rather, she spoke and I responded sympathetically.  It was as if we’d talked the week before.

The polar bear popped into my head and I asked the obvious question:  We’re having a perfectly amiable chat, why is it that we haven’t talked in more than five years?

“You stopped talking to me,” she said.

I recounted the half dozen attempts I’d made to show her friendship in recent years.   Exerting myself to meet her whenever she was in NY, in spite of only finding out about each of her trips once she was days from leaving NY.   Making plans, two weeks in advance, to stay with her for a couple of days during my last visit to San Francisco, plans she cancelled as I was literally blocks from her house with my overnight bag.

“I don’t remember any of that, because of the stroke,” she said.

“So what gives you the idea that I stopped talking to you?” I asked.

“Because you stopped talking to me.  Marilyn told me that you stopped talking to me,” she said.

If I hadn’t asked the obvious question, I’d never have known, or even suspected, that it was me, once more, completely in the wrong.